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26 November 2008
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Health service
As condition monitoring systems get more sophisticated, they look set to find a much wider range of uses in the transport sector.
Justin Cunningham
reports
Anyone who has experienced problems with a modern car will know that when you take it to the garage the mechanic is likely to reach for the laptop before the toolbox.
Although the transport sector has dabbled with the possibilities opened up by technology to monitor the so-called health of vehicles, it has only really been aviation that has seen widespread uptake. Much of the reason has to do with getting the business case right for builders of high-speed trains and cargo ships.
But condition monitoring could be a valuable component of manufacturers’ service businesses, which are seen as increasingly important as companies seek to add value to their products. Rolls-Royce, for example, operates its TotalCare service business with great success.
“Rolls-Royce is competing through its business model of TotalCare,” says Tim Baines, professor of strategic manufacture at Cranfield University. “A significant part of its revenue is coming through this business model. But it is very difficult to support a business model like that unless you have real-time information about how the asset is performing in the field.”
So Rolls-Royce joined forces with other companies to back Cranfield University in opening a multi-million pound Integrated Vehicle Health Management (IVHM) Centre. The aim of the Cranfield centre is to lead research into condition monitoring and management for aircraft, as well as ships, high-speed trains, high-performance cars, and possibly energy applications.
The centre is very much a partnership between service and technology. The university already runs a project called Product Service Solutions which looks at service business opportunities. It wants to combine this with the opportunities that vehicle health monitoring presents, and develop business models that will be able to use this data to support a service.
Baines says: “Manufacturers are increasingly interested in raising their competitive strategy on the provision of services. So the business model is a manufactured product but the provision of service helps them to actually win market share. IVHM is the technology platform that can complement the service model. Quite a few manufacturers are very keen upon this particular way of competing but need a technology platform to complement it.”
The centre will conduct research to advance existing concepts of condition monitoring systems for high-tech, high-value assets. IVHM works through sensors distributed throughout a vehicle to monitor, for example, the vibration and temperature of key components. Each sensor collects data on the condition of the components and subsystems. This data is then read by on-board processors which, through complex algorithms, assess the vehicle’s health and predict its future life and any deterioration.
This data is combined with maintenance schedules to maximise the value of assets by well-planned maintenance strategies. It is hoped that the results can be used to avoid potential component malfunctions, reduce operating costs, and allow companies to assess the effectiveness of their fleets.
The centre was created as a result of Boeing seeking to set up a centre of excellence for IVHM in the UK. Cranfield pulled together other core commercial partners – Rolls-Royce, BAE Systems, Thales UK and Meggitt – with the East of England Development Agency to become the preferred bidder for the facility.
Peter Lawrence, director of support technology at Boeing, says: “We have been trying to mature IVHM technology for a number of years. Bringing together industrial partners that have the same interest in solving certain problems is important to better understand how we can reduce the amount of maintenance time on our platforms. It also helps us with our service offerings, reducing our costs and our customers’ costs as well.”
Although longer term the centre hopes to apply the technology across various transport sectors, clearly with the partners it has at the moment the focus will be aerospace. The emphasis is on the systems engineering, bringing information from an asset into the decision-making process.
Jim Angus, commercial director of the centre, says: “There is a rich portfolio of technologies here at Cranfield which we can bring together in the new centre. For example, we do health usage monitoring systems (Hums) for helicopters, but we also have experience in vehicle and systems integration.”
The team wants to integrate the centre’s work with Cranfield’s student community, such as through student projects, and by developing an IVHM MSc programme.
Centre director Ian Jennions says: “You can’t hire an IVHM engineer as they simply don’t exist. It requires a number of different skills, not least of which is systems engineering. We can put together a masters that covers IVHM as a subject which is not being done anywhere else.”
© PE Publishing, 26 November 2008
